Welcome to Computer Science For Fun (CS4FN) – we support children (primary and secondary-aged) and computing educators (teachers and homeschoolers) in the UK and beyond through our fun, free magazines and inspiring classroom resources.
We have several linked websites –
1. CS4FN.blog (this website) – is aimed at secondary school-aged kids (12+, typically 14+) and is full of articles about all sorts of topics, either for them to read themselves or for you to use in the classroom. Learn about Black History in Computing or maybe find out about computer science in the movies through our themed portals. We produce an A4 print magazine (20pp) which is sent free to subscribing UK schools and home educators. If you’d like one or more copies you can sign up here. (Our older website is cs4fn.org and we’re moving articles from there to here.)
2. Teaching London Computing – is the sister site to CS4FN and is for teachers. There you can download classroom activities to teach particular concepts and topics, in a fun and engaging (and usually unplugged way). Our popular activities include The Emotion Machine and Searching To Speak, but you might also enjoy our pixel puzzles and phonics kriss-kross puzzles for younger children. If you’d like to sneak a bit of computer science into other topics you teach (or would like to sneak other subjects into your computing classes) we have a handy “Computing and…” page, showing the many ways in which computing mixes with other topics.
3. A bit of CS4FN – this is our site for primary aged (7-12) children and has shorter articles and more colourful imagery. We also produce mini magazines, again sent to subscribing schools and home educators, which have puzzles and suggestions for fun activities. You can sign up here. You can also download our previous issues at the link below.
4. The CS4FN downloads site – this is our one-stop shop for PDFs of all our back issues. Everything is free (except a couple of text books) and you can download all previous issues of the CS4FN magazine, A bit of CS4FN and other primary booklets, and our hugely popular Magic of Computer Science booklets. We also have several computing-themed and computing-history posters for your classroom walls or school corridors.
What else do we do?
We give talks at schools and events, run Royal Institution Masterclasses in Computer Science at the Ri and at QMUL and elsewhere, contribute input into computing curricula in schools and run workshops for teachers too.
Get in touch on Twitter | Mastodon | Bluesky or Email.
EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
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